The sister was looking at them curiously.
"What do you want?" Gyan’s refrigerated voice repeated.
To think that she had come to call him momo, cosy scoop of minced mutton in charming dimpled wrapping, that she had come to climb into his lap, ask why he hadn’t forgiven her as before at the Christmastime fight, but she wouldn’t satisfy him by admitting any vulnerability now.
Instead she said she had come about Father Booty.
Her outrage at the injustice done to her friend returned to her in a rush. Dear Father Booty, who had been forced onto a jeep leaving for the Siliguri airport, having lost everything but his memories: the time he had given a lecture on how dairies might create a mini Swiss-style economy in Kalimpong and had been greeted with a standing ovation; his poem on a cow in the Illustrated Weekly; and "Nothing so sweet, dear friends" – evenings on Uncle Potty’s veranda, when the music ended on a drawn-out note of honey, and the moon – it was whole – sailed upward, an alchemist’s marvel of illuminated cheese. How fast the earth spun! It was all over.
How was he to live where, he despaired, he would be snipped into an elderly person supported by the state and packaged in a very clean box alongside other aged people with supposedly everything in common with him -
He had left his friend Uncle Potty in mourning, drinking, the world breaking in waves about him; chair going one way, the table and stove the other; the whole kitchen rocking back and forth.
"Look at what you people are doing," she accused Gyan.
"What am I doing? What have I to do with Father Booty?"
"Everything."
"Well, if that’s what it will take, so be it. Should Nepalis sit miserably for another two hundred years so the police don’t have an excuse to throw out Father Booty?" He came out of the gate, marched her away from his house.
"Yes," said Sai. "You, for one, are better gone than Father Booty. Think you’re wonderful… well, you know what? You’re not! He’s done much more than you ever will for people on this hillside."
Gyan became seriously angry.
"In fact, good thing they kicked him out," he said, "who needs Swiss people here? For how many thousands of years have we produced our own milk?"
"Why don’t you then? Why don’t you make cheese?"
"We live in India, thank you very much. We don’t want any cheese and the last thing we need is chocolate cigars."
"Ah, that same old thing again." She wished to claw him. She wanted to pluck out his eyes and kick him black-and-blue. The taste of blood, salty, dark – she could anticipate its flavor. "Civilization is important," she said.
"That is not civilization, you fool. Schools and hospitals. That is."
You fool – how dare he!
"But you have to set a standard. Or else everything will be brought down to the same low level as you and your family."
She was shocked at herself as she spoke, but in this moment she was willing to believe anything that lay on the other side of Gyan.
"I see, Swiss luxury sets a standard, chocolates and watches set the standard… Yes, soothe your guilty conscience, stupid little girl, and hope someone doesn’t burn down your house for the simple reason that you are a fool."
Again he was calling her fool -
"If this is what you’ve been thinking, why didn’t you boycott the cheese instead of gobbling it down? Now you attack it? Hypocrite! But it was very nice to eat the cheese when you got a chance, no? All that cheese toast? Hundreds of pieces of cheese toast you must have eaten. Let alone the chocolate cigars… So greedy, eating them like a fat pig. And tuna fish on toast and peanut butter biscuits!"
By now, with the conversation disintegrating, his sense of humor began to return to him, and Gyan began to giggle, his eyes to soften, and she could see his expression shift. They were falling back into familiarity, into common ground, into the dirty gray. Just ordinary humans in ordinary opaque boiled-egg light, without grace, without revelation, composite of contradictions, easy principles, arguing about what they half believed in or even what they didn’t believe in at all, desiring comfort as much as raw austerity, authenticity as much as playacting, desiring cozi-ness of family as much as to abandon it forever. Cheese and chocolate they wanted, but also to kick all these bloody foreign things out. A wild daring love to bicycle them into the sky, but also a rice and dal love blessed by the unexciting feel of everyday, its surprises safely enmeshed in something solidly familiar like marrying the daughter or son of your father’s best friend and grumbling about the cost of potatoes, the cost of onions. Every single contradiction history or opportunity might make available to them, every contradiction they were heir to, they desired. But only as much, of course, as they desired purity and a lack of contradiction.
Sai began to laugh a bit as well.
"Momo?" she said, switching to a pleading tone.
Then, in a flash he veered back, was angry again. Remembered this was not a conversation he wished to end in laughter. The infantile nickname, the tender feel of her eyes – it aroused his ire. Her getting him to apologize, trying to smother him, swaddle him, drag him to drown in this pish pash mash, sicky sticky baby sweetieness… eeeshhh…
He needed to be a man. He needed to stand tall and be rough. Dryness, space, good firm gestures. Not this fritter, flutter, this worming in sugar…
Oh yes, how he needed to be strong -
For, if truth be told, as the weeks went by, he, Gyan, was scared – he who had thought there was no joy like screaming victory over oppression, he who had raised his fist to authority, who had found the fire of his college friends purifying, he who had claimed the hillside, enjoyed the thought of those Mon Ami sisters with their fake English accents blanching and trembling – he, who was hero for the homeland…
He listened with growing trepidation as the conversation in Gompu’s gained in fervor. When did shouting and strikes get you anywhere, they said, and talked of burning the circuit house, robbing the petrol pump.
When Chhang and Bhang, Gyan, Owl and Donkey had leaped into jeeps, filled up at the petrol station and driven off without paying, Gyan had been shaking just as much as the pump manager on the other side of the window, the muscles of his heart performing uncontrollable spasms.
There were those who were provoked by the challenge, but Gyan was finding that he wasn’t one of these. He was angry that his family hadn’t thought to ban him, keep him home. He hated his tragic father, his mother who looked to him for direction, had always looked to him for direction, even when he was a little boy, simply for being male. He spent the nights awake, worrying he couldn’t live up to his proclamations.
But then, how could you have any self-respect knowing that you didn’t believe in anything exactly? How did you embrace what was yours if you didn’t leave something for it? How did you create a life of meaning and pride?
Yes, he owed much to his rejection of Sai.
The chink she had provided into another world gave him just enough room to kick; he could work against her, define the conflict in his life that he felt all along, but in a cotton-woolly way. In pushing her away, an energy was born, a purpose whittled. He wouldn’t sweetly reconcile.